Sunday, June 5, 2011

Antonio Valencia tries not to think about that night any more, the indescribable pain, the fear that flashed through his mind when he looked down at his leg and realised it had been snapped like a dried twig, his foot hanging back to front. And, above all, the hideous sense that his four-year-old daughter, Domenica, was watching it all unfold in the Old Trafford crowd.

On the stretcher Valencia raised his arm towards the stands. At the time, it looked like he was thanking the crowd for their solemn applause. In fact, it was to show the tattoo of Domenica's name on the inside of his arm. "All I can remember now is the pain, the worst pain of my life," he says, "but my first thought was to do that for her and show her I was going to be all right."

This was in September, a Champions League night against Rangers, a seemingly innocuous challenge from Kirk Broadfoot and then those ghastly moments when Valencia's team-mates went over to see their stricken colleague then, one by one, turned away, covering their faces, and it became apparent to everyone inside the stadium this was an injury that could break a footballer's career.

For many UFO conspiracy aficionados, the phrase "Area 51" conjures up images of a secret military facility in the Nevada desert that's home for captured flying saucers. But is this true?

"Area 51; An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," a new book by investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, lifts the veil on this six-decade mystery and raises a more explosive possibility: Did former Soviet leader Josef Stalin recruit Josef Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death," to surgically alter children to look like aliens in 1947 to be part of the legendary Roswell, NM, UFO crash?

If the story is correct, the "UFO" and its otherworldly occupants eventually found their way to Area 51 for examination.

The government has never officially confirmed that Area 51 exists. And yet, as Jacobsen learned while researching her Area 51 book, Cold War spy planes (including the U-2) were developed at the base. Through declassified documents and discussions with Area 51 personnel, Jacobsen pieced together the puzzle of what went on there.

"In my reporting, I used 74 sources, 32 of whom lived and worked at Area 51 for extended periods of time," Jacobsen told AOL.

"In many previously classified documents relating to activities at the base, the words 'Area 51' are conveniently blacked out," Jacobsen said. "There's always a euphemism for it -- like 'the test facility' or 'the base' -- but never Area 51."

While conspiracy theorists and UFO devotees have long claimed -- and hoped-- that captured alien spacecraft are housed at the base, Jacobsen claims the secret craft were actually reverse-engineered from a captured Soviet MiG fighter jet. The A-12 Oxcart, a Mach 3 spy plane, was also reportedly developed at Area 51. http://weirdnews.aol.com